Legal Issues

"Over the past year, Canadians have faced a barrage of claims painting Canada as a "piracy haven." This video - the second in my collaboration with Daniel Albahary - moves beyond the headlines to demonstrate how the claims do not tell the whole story."

Hans Reiser is waiting for me, standing on the other side of an imitation-wood table. The room is small, the concrete walls bare. A guard locks the steel door from the outside. There is no sound. Reiser is wearing the red jumpsuit of a prisoner in solitary confinement, though he has been allowed to meet with me in this chilly visiting room. There was a time when he was known as a cantankerous but visionary open source programmer. His work was funded by the government; he was widely credited (and sometimes reviled) for rethinking the structure of the Linux operating system. Now he is known as prisoner BFP563.

There's been a lot of legal saber rattling in and about the Linux world in recent weeks, including dire warnings from Microsoft's lawyers that open-source software violates patents held by the software giant and fears that the Free Software Foundation might punish Novell for its controversial patent deal with Microsoft. But so far the response from the solution provider community has been more of a collective shrug.

After meeting and informally talking with the judge who will preside over his case, computer science engineer Hans Reiser agreed Tuesday to delay his trial on charges that he murdered his wife Nina Reiser until at least September.

As a murder trial gets under way Monday in the disappearance of Nina Reiser, a 31-year-old mother of two missing since September, defense lawyers are trying to sow doubt about whether she is dead at all.

Novell's decision to acquire Suse back in 2003 was a smart move for a struggling company. Having seen the market lead of its NDS directory product gradually eroded by Microsoft's Active Directory alternative and Windows NT, Novell was a company looking for an identity. Buying a way into the open-source community helped it plug right back into the zeitgeist — and more importantly, made Wall Street sit up and take notice again.

The thought of Microsoft suing Sun Microsystems for infringing patents it holds for Microsoft Office seems ludicrous. However, according to a leading open source expert that's what Microsoft will have to do if it is serious about trying to uphold its claim that OpenOffice.org infringes 45 of the patents it holds.